Artmaking for me is an inquiry: a question grounded in and derived from an intuitive process-based practice. My process is grounded in concepts of printmaking: exploring the usage of the multiple with a keen awareness of the printed surface. Central to these investigations is a practice that is interdisciplinary in nature: I make objects, and then employ sewing, drawing, printmaking, and papermaking techniques to construct spaces and installations that decipher the landscape. The resulting artworks underscore my interest in patterns, boundaries, and systems that describe relationships between people and space. As the work itself changes in scale, space relationships, sewn lines, loose threads, and various types of map imagery become stratified.
A terrane is a distinct sliver of rock that is embedded in the surrounding geological landscape. It is a placeholder, an anchor, a cohesive fragment. It is totally foreign, isolated, and a remnant but at the same time it completes the puzzle of strata. If I extend the analogy to a person, a terrane becomes a collection of past fragmented experiences and the re-created landscape becomes a dynamic moving structure. Using science and psychology in tandem to borrow structures and concepts of order, I can find an external visual analogy for internal structures. In a sense I am echoing Italo Calvino’s epistemological question: “Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in everyway conceivable.”
The practice of reworking, expanding, further fragmenting or re-puzzling my work back together reflects a desire to discover a sense of order through the process of making. That constant shuffle is essential to make a more complete picture—a single vantage point through fragments. I can see my place within this large network; I can impose my own order, which exists only because I do.
